It's curiosity. People care about this game, their characters, their lore fix, and their progression.

When the game is late back up, a feeling of curiosity and, based on some notable issues in the past, dread starts forming.

Is this going to spin out to days? It's happened before.Will I be missing things or stuck or rubberbanded back? It's happened before.Will I be able to get my mail out of the mailbox? It's happened before.Will my Hunter's pet still exist? will my armor stored in my bank suddenly be broken?

Every MMO I've been involved in (working on, gm'ing for, and playing) have maintenance on a schedule, the difference is the other ones all come right out and say, Here's what we are doing, and what we hope to have fixed and if it is going to take longer than they announce they tell you "This or that didn't go as expected and it's going to take us another 2 hours to get everything going again."

Their forums will have a thread like this with that info sticky'd to the top and most of the responses will be "Ok thanks, good to know" and then the rest of the forums will go on as normal without the massive "I WANT TO PLAY THE COMPANY SUCKS WHY DO THEY HATE ME SO MUCH" threads all over the place.

Yes, it sucks (especially if you have tuesdays off and just wanted to play, although this is not new or different from the previous 8 years, so maybe you should try and arrange a different day off?), and Yes, Blizz is doing their job and stuff like this needs to get done.

and yes people are going to complain about it.

But really, if someone from blizzard could take a minute to say "Well here's what we are doing and what is going on now and here's why we had to extend it." I think that would go a long way to cutting down on the massiveness of these threads. It's good that people care about the game world and their characters, blizzard needs you to care about it to make money. But they really should communicate a little better to the player base.

These maintenance policies of posting extensions after the set time frame really needs to be rethought. They are disrespectful to Blizzard's paying community.

The cynicism in this thread is directly related to how Blizzard treats their customers. If you can't validate your paying subscribers with a maintenance window that you can meet, then don't set the window up.

For example:"Today, Tuesday November 13, 2012, we will be performing maintenance for an extended period of time. We will provide an estimated completion time as more information becomes available."

Maintenance is inevitable. I work for a large scale internet service provider myself and know this. However, now that maintenance is arching into prime time for most of the EST and CST time zones, this is just a plain bad business tactic. In my field of work, if we were to perform maintenance during prime time (or if it were to be extended into prime time) we would lose subscribers. In this case, you may not lose subscribers because you're the sole provider, BUT, one day, there will be something bigger and better than WoW. Set the standard for when that time comes and be better than this.

Thanks for the reasonable and well phrased post. Eventually there will be a pixel dragon purveyor that is capable of understanding what a production window is and how to avoid interrupting it.

Over the course of the years of gaming in WoW, Blizzard has extended maintenance time and time again...

Taking into account that you perform extended maintenance at least twice a month every month, that means paying customers are losing, on average, 48 hours a month of their paid subscriptions.

This amounts to 24 days a year of lost subscription time.

So, by paying 12 months of subscriptions, we actually are only getting 11 months and 6 days.

The rest of that additional months time is just gone.

I think it's time Blizzard starts either getting their job done on time, every time, or start paying us back for our lost time.

Now some of you will say... "But it's only a couple of hours."

While, at the time, that may very well be true, but then if you look at the bigger picture, that statement is very untrue.

24 days of lost time is hardly a "couple of hours".

So, let's talk reimbursement.

How about it Blizzard?

Will you start finishing on time, or are you going to start giving back to your paying customers for the time you keep taking from us without proper explaination?

And your numbers are highly doctored... truth is... assuming you are paying $15/month, you are paying a grand total of 0.020833 per hour

now, would you prefer they did it right... or brought it up at exactly X time to suit your preconceived wishes? I might also point you to the TOU where it states very clearly that they can take the servers down at anytime for any reason.

here, I'll even point you to the forum rules regarding multiple thread about the same thing, which it appears you failed to read also,

Creating Duplicate ThreadsThis category includes:

Creating threads about existing topicsCreating a separate thread about an existing topic for further discussion in more than one forumIf a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:

if the reason for the extended maintenance is cleaning up the pvp ladder, then great. anything else, please fire whoever is in charge of planning the DT and maintenance procedures, because he sucks at his job.

with 10 million users affected by his screwup i don't see it any other way.

just kidding...I think that at the core of these delays..this is what frustrates a lot of us.

In a business transaction, when there is a contract...like a service is provided for a service or in our case money, we expect, if we pay accordingly for the other party to supply our request (play time etc,), accordingly.

However, in the real world, if one of the parties does not hold up their end of the bargin, then the other party either doesn't provide or sets up a new contract or a clause within the original contract to be refunded in some way. If the service is not provided by one of the parties due to intentional or unintentional delays, it is THEIR responsibility to accomodate or refund the other party in some way.

Now what pisses us of, is that Blizz says "ohhh yea...sorry about that..." and then continue to take our money. I understand about server problems, and I am not complaining about the time delay. What I do have a problem with is them not giving us something in return.

My solution, give us 1 day gametime (like you used to back in vanilla). Simple, fair. Amirite?

Yip my day off and again another day wasted by yet ANOTHER extended maintnece, I alsonticed blizz is pretty quick to end my subscribtion to instead of a days grace here and there...why do i have to pay for 4 days of a month when they cant get the servers up and running. I mean Blizz used to be gracefull back in BC when yes they had many problems they gave us 1-3 days free play because of the maintences and restarts. Now more then ever blizz is just money hungry and wont credit back the days you pay for. Hey Blizz heres an Idea? why not a free week of game play for x-mas instead of the same old Gaudy Winter Shirt?

By now you should have figured out that Tuesdays are maintenance days. Sometimes for just a tiny bit of time, often for a good chunk of time, and sometimes for a large chunk of time. You're level 90 with over 12k AP -- this shouldn't be new information for you.

As for why we pay for the days we can't play -- that's because we've clicked an agreement, at this point probably dozens of times over the years, saying that we AGREE to pay -- whether we can access the servers or not.